HOWARD CITY, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – A Michigan school dress code fight could be heading to the nation’s highest court, raising a simple but explosive question: can schools censor political speech that isn’t actually profane – just because someone thinks it “means” something profane?

Two Tri County middle school students, who are brothers, were told to remove their “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts back in 2022, despite the phrase containing no explicit language and causing no disruption in school.

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The phrase “Let’s Go Brandon” emerged in 2021 after a NASCAR interview in which a crowd chanting an explicit anti-Joe Biden slogan was misheard by a reporter as cheering for driver Brandon Brown. It quickly caught on as a widely recognized, cleaned-up way to express criticism of then- President Joe Biden – allowing speakers to convey the same sentiment without using the profane phrase “F**k Joe Biden.”

Sanitized speech banned.

School officials argued the slogan violated rules against “profane” clothing. The district stuck to its position that the phrase carried a “profane double meaning,” even if the words themselves were clean. That interpretation carried the day in lower courts, where judges ruled the phrase was close enough to profanity to justify banning it.

Judge Paul L. Maloney said in a court document that the school officials had “reasonably interpreted the phrase as containing a profane message.”

A ‘recipe for viewpoint discrimination’?

Now, attorneys with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) are petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case on appeal filed on March 26.

“Our argument is simple: Students have the right to express their political views in school,” said attorney Conor Fitzpatrick in a recent press release.

In an interview with Michigan News Source, Fitzpatrick warned that the current standard lets virtually any staff member decide what counts as “vulgar,” calling it “a recipe for inconsistent enforcement” and even viewpoint discrimination. He added that constitutional rights shouldn’t change depending on the building – or even the classroom: “That doesn’t make sense. That’s not how constitutional rights work.”

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The case leans heavily on the landmark Tinker v. Des Moines decision, where the Supreme Court ruled students don’t shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate. FIRE argues the Michigan ruling flips that principle on its head – allowing schools to censor speech based on subjective interpretations.